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Update 0.10.4 released!

The Paris Drone Festival was amazing, and now you can participate too! With 0.10.4 we release a complete new environment to race in. Who will be the fastest pilot of Paris?!

Changelist

Added Paris Drone Festival environment

Added Paris Drone Festival track and race

Added five new track elements to the track building tool

Implemented new method of dealing with height limits

Ghost drones now fly smooth again, using interpolation

Fixed issue with the spawn point selection menu in Free Flight

Fixed clipping issues of drone in main menu

Linux: disabled Vulkan support for better compatibility

Paris Drone Festival

The long awaited Paris Drone Festival environment is finally available for everyone to enjoy. The original plan would allow players to fly inside the flight cage of the festival, but the team went the extra mile to make the environments around it available as well. Enjoy!

Height Limits

Many community requests have to do with Liftoff’s environment border system. Rest assured, the team at LuGus Studios is not a fan of level borders either. It’s human nature to want to explore and to know what’s behind the next hill. Liftoff was never built to be an open world exploration game, but as a race game centered around race tracks. There’s a certain degree of immersion that needs to be maintained, much like how you are not allowed to wander behind the scenes at an amusement in the interest of preserving the magic of the place so that’s why we will never remove the borders completely.

Nonetheless there’s much room for improvement and with update 0.10.4, we introduce a new way of dealing with the height limits in our environments. No longer can you fly too high, resulting in a hard respawn at the start point. We’ve introduced something we call a “soft invisible ceiling”, and while the name could suggest you would hit a ceiling when you fly too high, in practice this invisible ceiling only affects your throttle output. Your drone will simply refuse to fly higher, which gets rid of the reset function we have in place before. When you reach the maximum height, you can now continue to fly as you like, as long as it’s not “up”.

We’ll continue to experiment with different ways to deal with borders in future updates.